Midnight Abduction

Her confidence, combined with her hand still on his arm, slowed his racing heart rate, and suddenly he was more aware of her than ever. Aware of the way her bangs settled along the curve of her cheeks, the way the swell of her lower lip was slightly fuller than the top and how the brown in her eyes had seemingly deepened over the past few minutes. She was a strong, intelligent, confident woman who’d committed herself to saving the lives of strangers on a daily basis, not to mention she was one of the most intense people he’d ever met. Admirable. Honest. Observant. Everything he thought he’d wanted in a life partner. Gravity pulled his gaze to her dark red fingertips resting against his skin. Until she’d left without a word. “Tell me why I had to find out you’d requested a transfer to Washington after you’d already left.”

She let her hand slip away, the burn of her touch chased back by the cold penetrating through the wall of windows on his right. Diverting that mesmerizing gaze of hers toward his daughter in the bed, she took a step back. “Benning, we don’t have to do this now.”

“I was afraid you were dead.” The admission tore from him. The hollowness he’d struggled to fill had been increasing every second since the moment she’d walked into that hospital room, and he couldn’t take it anymore. “I called the police, the hospitals, the FBI, anyone who might’ve been able to tell me where you were or what’d happened to you. I looked for you for three days, Ana, with no phone calls, no messages, no emails or texts.” He forced himself to take a deep breath before their conversation woke Olivia. “I woke up, and you were just…gone. I want to know—”

“Because my partner found her body.” A hardness etched into her expression, her voice dropping into level territory. No emotion. No infliction. In an instant, the woman who’d joked with him a few minutes ago disappeared. Nothing but the cold, distant, detached federal agent he’d believed her capable of being all these years.

Confusion gripped him hard. “Whose body?”

“Samantha Perry,” she said.

He’d heard that name before. Why did it sound so familiar? Somberness overcame him, his hands relaxing at his sides. Recognition flared as snippets of memory of his and Ana’s first meeting rushed to the front of his mind. The first time he’d set eyes on her, she’d been partnered with another agent, but while Benning couldn’t remember her partner’s name, he could never forget Samantha Perry. Hell. “The teenage girl you’d come to Sevierville to find.”

“They found her in the corner of an alley between two restaurants in Knoxville, discarded like a piece of trash three months after she disappeared.” Her eyes remained steady on his, but almost absent, distant in the way she never blinked. “I was assigned to find her. I promised her family I would find her. She was an innocent fifteen-year-old girl who’d been taken from school by a janitor named Harold Wood who worked there, but we couldn’t prove it. We searched his house, his car, the entire school. There was no sign of her, of her clothing, DNA, nothing, but her best friend swore she’d seen him on campus the day she went missing. The only proof that could’ve nailed that bastard to the wall was if her body turned up, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I needed to find her alive, but I was too late. I failed her.” Ana unfolded her arms, her gaze suddenly alive, the muscles across her shoulders hard. “She died because I let myself get distracted. With you.”

His stomach dropped. A distraction?

“The minute I got that call from my partner, I swore to myself I would never let my emotions cloud my judgment again. So yes, I requested the transfer, and as soon as I got it, I left.” She took a single step toward him. “Because every minute I wasn’t focused on finding Samantha Perry was another minute she’d been tortured, violated and alone.” Her expression smoothed as though she couldn’t hold back the exhaustion and effects of blood loss anymore. Defeated. “I can’t live with the weight of another life on my shoulders, Benning. Even for you.”